South Korean soldiers stand on alert facing a North Korean soldier across the concrete marked line dividing the two Koreas in the sensitive Demilitarized Zone at the Joint Security Area.

On Saturday morning, North Korea caused a stir with a statement saying that the peninsula had been put on a “state of war”. That got a lot of attention, including from my wife, who noticed the headline on Yahoo after breakfast and asked me “is it true?”

Yep, it’s true, I told her. It’s been true for the last 63 years.

After the North invaded the South in 1950, conflict waged up and down the peninsula for three years before grinding to an eventual halt with the signing of an armistice agreement in July 1953. This year marks the 60th anniversary of that event.

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But since the armistice wasn’t a formal peace treaty, the Korean peninsula has technically remained a war zone to this day. There hasn’t been any sustained conflict, of course, but North Korea has staged various attacks and incursions, mostly at sea.

The two Koreas did sign a non-aggression pact in 1991, which was significant because South Korea wasn’t actually a party to the 1953 armistice. Its leader at that time, Syngman Rhee, wanted to keep fighting to unify the Korean peninsula. The armistice was signed by the United Nations command on behalf of forces on the southern side.

North Korea has long called for a formal peace treaty to replace the armistice in order to guarantee its own security, but it has been unwilling to give up its nuclear program in order to move that process forward.

Instead, it has tried to move things along by taking another approach: brinkmanship. That gameplan involves creating a major crisis — or the impression of it — in order to try and generate enough alarm for South Korea, the U.S. and others to come scrambling to the table with a peace treaty in hand.

The way to do that, the thinking goes, is to kick away the apparent barriers to full-blown conflict and display a readiness to fight. Hence, North Korea has said at least seven times that the armistice agreement is no longer valid, including in this latest cycle of tough talk, and has also said that the non-aggression pact with the South is “null and void.” It’s also said you can forget about denuclearization and there’ll be no phone calls, either.

Military drills, mass rallies in Pyongyang, statements about nuking Washington and late-night meetings over maps of attack plans are the other part of the routine.

What does today’s declaration of a “state of war” add to that? Frankly, nothing. South Korea says it hasn’t seen any unusual military movements in the North and workers from the South traveled into the Kaesong Industrial complex in the North as usual. North Korea later said it was upset that some in South Korea had said that it only keeps the complex open because it badly needs the income from it and threatened to close it if the South continues to “insult its dignity.”

There are some other points to note. Today’s statement wasn’t attributed to any specific entity, which weakens its impact. Edicts issued by the National Defense Commission, North Korea’s most important decision making body, carry particular significance. Meetings of the central committee of the Korean Workers’ Party and the Supreme People’s Assembly, the rubber-stamp legislature, in coming days may produce similar war-like statements.

The “war declaration” was made in the conditional, as is standard for Pyongyang. Some of today’s wording says North Korea will “immediately punish any slightest provocation hurting its dignity and sovereignty with resolute and merciless physical actions without any prior notice.”

These kinds of statements can’t just be ignored and the U.S. said it was taking this latest one seriously. But the biggest significance of today’s turgid blast is that it injects yet more tension on both sides as media report on the new threat, increasing the risk of a misstep that could trigger a major fight.

It’s also not good for the blood pressure of journalists or their spouses.